Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Shoah memorial visit by imams raises questions

The Jewish author and philosopher Professor Shmuel Trigano was perturbed by the visit by Muslim imams to the Shoah memorial at Drancy last month, whence thousands of French Jews were deported to their deaths. The visit, he argues, misses the main bone of contention between Jews and Muslims : the legitimacy of the state of Israel, called into question by 14 centuries of Muslim antisemitism. Trigano might have added that the visit also fails to address Arab and Muslim complicity with the Shoah. Article in JForum:

Superficially, the tour violated a taboo boldly ideological and
political widespread in the Muslim world: the denial of the Holocaust is
part of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy doctrine in favor of Zionism.On
the second level, a fundamental question arises: how would to "recognize" the
Holocaust or sympathize with its memory be an act of
reconciliation, "recognition" promoting Jewish-Arab brotherhood in
France, an act against the antisemitism of the Muslim world? Is the Holocaust the central issue of hostility of the Arab-Muslim world towards the Jews?This question has a "double bottom". The
imams' gesture, after all, is determined with respect to a given
reality, ie to what they hear Jews saying - their representatives, public
opinion, the French State (represented by minister Valls ) who have suggested that this was the crux of the problem. But
the pain in Muslim-Jewish relationships is not the
Holocaust but the legitimacy of the State of Israel, the recognition of
historical truth and the right of the Jewish people and Judaism to freedom. It is also the bone of contention resulting from the anti-Semitism that Jews have suffered for centuries under the rule of Islam. A million Jews were expelled from the Arab world in the twentieth century. The
fact that 600,000 of them have found refuge in Israel has to be understood in
the context of the permanent war of extermination being waged by the Arab world
against Israel. (My emphasis - ed)

But this subject is generally obfuscated. To place recognition of that fear in the same basket as the Holocaust deepens the hatred of the (Muslim) "suburbs": it turns the
Jews into absolute victims, while the Arab world, the post-colonial world,
have engaged
in competitive victimhood with them, even to the point of making Israel
the epitome of the Nazi executioner or to the extreme left, to see in the
sacred Holocaust a "colonial crime."The Imams have not crossed that threshold. They
kept to the script at the Memorial: they prayed, they exalted Islam as a "religion of
peace", and the ceremony ended with an official dinner in honor of the
birthday of the Prophet of Islam - at the cost of heavy blurring of its meaning on a symbolic level.The presence of Jews testified ipso facto that the bone of contention is the Arab-Jewish Holocaust.The State's policy over the last 20 years, exploits religion for security and civil peace (..).In
this symbolic management of the Holocaust, moreover, the
victim is "human" and "universal". He anonymous, so that real Jews can fade out and re-appear as Nazi executioners.Here
we have one of the mainsprings of the new anti-Semitism and the reasons
why it is not recognized for what it is, a political fact, but narrowly
addressed as right-wing racism or "ethno-religious " tension ", to be soothed by compassion for victims or community peacemaking ceremonies.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

193IdshprIt does not do any harm for imams to pray at that ceremony. We accept Christian priests why not accept Muslim imams; and let us not forget that (i.e. the Inquisition)Christianity did worse than any other religion.The thing is WE MUST PRAY THAT THIS NEVER HAPPENS AGAINSULTANA

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)